“These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognize the years of one’s prime, always remember that.”

– Jean Brodie, a girls’ school teacher, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark

Not long ago I flew to Amsterdam, checked into my favorite hotel, and, the next day, took a train to Rotterdam to have drinks and dinner with an old friend.

I’m 66. He’s 64. We’ve known each other since we were aspiring young writers, me living in New York City and him in the Pacific Northwest. It began in 1990, when, at the age of 30, he published a debut novel that I reviewed with enthusiasm. It was when his book tour brought him to New York that we met for the first time.  (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Radical Wolfe: An Underwhelming Account of the Revolutionary Journalist)

After that, we kept in touch. He lived for a time in the Netherlands, and his delight in that country, as communicated vividly in his second novel, inspired me to visit it. Within a year I had moved to Amsterdam, where we met for dinner at a place called Café Kale, a few steps away from my flat.

The years rolled on. From Amsterdam I moved to Norway, where I still live. Meanwhile he raised a kid in the States before returning to the Netherlands and settling, as noted, in Rotterdam. In short, though we think of ourselves as friends, and though he’s played a crucial role in both my personal and professional lives (if not for his enthusiasm for the Netherlands, I’d never have met my current partner, 26 years ago, on Dutch-language Internet Relay Chat, and would never have written my most successful book, While Europe Slept), we’ve met only three times in person: once as aspiring young scribes, once as writers in what is called “mid-career,” and once as two men in their sixties.

Three times, spanning three different phases of life. It’s odd to think about. It makes life seem incredibly short. Indeed, as we sat in his garden chatting over cocktails, I volunteered that it feels weird to think that I’ve reached this age. Everything, I said, seems to have gone by so fast. When I asked him how he was doing on that score, he replied that he actually liked being 64. 

“We’re past our prime,” he said cheerfully. 

Past our prime. I hadn’t ever thought of it that way. 

Or considered being cheerful about it. 

He went on to explain that being at our stage of life was a great thing. We don’t feel so compelled to play by other people’s rules. As writers, we’re freer to do whatever we want. 

Now, as I sit here typing this, I’m thinking of another longtime friend of mine, Terry Teachout, who for years led a hectic life as the theater critic of the Wall Street Journal. He’d spend one week seeing New York shows and the next week attending regional productions all over the U.S. In addition, he wrote books, plays, and opera librettos, contributed a long monthly column to Commentary, kept up a popular arts blog, and hosted a lively podcast with two other drama critics called Three on the Aisle. (READ MORE: Ms. Turns Fifty)

And then, in January of last year, he died suddenly. He was 65. 

Everyone who knew him was shocked. I still haven’t gotten over it, partly because I identified with him so strongly. In many ways I thought of him as my alter ego, my Döppelganger. We were the same age. We had very similar tastes, and we’d both managed to turn our love for books and ideas and the arts into rewarding careers. Up to the end, we’d kept in close touch, comparing notes on the Zeitgeist and confiding in each other about personal matters.  

Did Terry, in his last days, feel that he was past his prime? No. I know he didn’t. And nobody else who knew him did, either. That’s why his death came as a universal shock. He still kept a crowded schedule. And he was still looking ahead. At the end of 2021, a couple of weeks before his death, he celebrated the arrival of a new love in his life, exulting on Twitter that “my star has risen again” and declaring that he looked forward eagerly to finding out what “surprises” 2022 had in store for him. 

It didn’t seem to occur to him for a second that the surprise might be in the shape of a coffin. 

I’ve always reacted with astonishment to people who claimed to enjoy the passage of time. In the early 1970s, Julie Andrews had a variety show on which the theme song was “Time Is My Friend.” (It had exactly the same melody as the 1961 hit “Portrait of My Love,” but that’s another story.) She’s 87 now. Her voice went long ago. Does she still feel that way about time? Similarly, the premise of Timeless, the TV special on which Barbra Streisand ushered in the year 2000, was that time — as personified on the show by dancer Savion Glover — was her friend. Has Babs, now 81, changed her mind?

It’s one thing to know you’re mortal and can go at any time. The boy who sat next to me in eighth-grade homeroom killed himself that year. A college friend committed suicide, too. I lived in Manhattan at a time when it was Ground Zero for AIDS; the regulars at my favorite bars were dropping like flies. But they all died in their so-called prime. That was what made their deaths so tragic. To die when you’re already past your prime seems by definition to be not quite such a tragedy. (READ MORE: Do You Miss New York?)

It Doesn’t Last Long

To be sure, it’s one hell of a brief prime. What is it, twenty to sixty? Or is it more like twenty-five to fifty-five? In the Republic, Plato put it at “about twenty years in a woman’s life, and thirty in a man’s.” (If Plato were alive today, he’d probably be canceled the way that Don Lemon was after he said on the air, last February, that 50-something-year-old women like Nikki Haley were “past their prime.”) 

An old friend of my family, an actress named Marsha Hunt, died last year, a month shy of 105. Until a year or so before her demise, she was almost totally compos mentis. Does that mean that she spent almost the last half of her life past her prime? 

Whatever the case, the prime of life is short. And yet how long a time some of us spend readying ourselves for it! From kindergarten through grad school, I spent a total of twenty-one years in classrooms. During all those years of study, it feels as if the period of mature productivity for which you’re preparing — your prime! — will last a long time. In reality, it’s gone before you know it. 

Nor is the journey through one’s prime ever easy. While you’re living through it, certain utterly ridiculous things can actually seem important. One tiny example. In New York, I was involved for a while in the poetry scene, and every time somebody in our circle got a poem into the New Yorker there was a widespread gnashing of teeth. The whiff of envy in the air was palpable. I didn’t care (for me, scribbling poetry was always just a sideline), but a lot of people I knew cared a lot. You’d have thought that placing a poem in that stuffy rag was a matter of life or death. 

As for personal travails, I think of a tune sung by Maurice Chevalier in Gigi: “The rivals that don’t exist at all, / The feeling you’re only two feet tall, / I’m glad that I’m not young anymore.” (Of course, that’s the same movie — an Oscar winner for Best Picture! — in which Chevalier warbles the now deeply disturbing lyric “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” But that’s another story, too.) (READ MORE: What’s in a Name?)  

Granted, some people, once past their prime, miss it terribly. The other day my sister, Carol, posted on Facebook: “Sometimes I feel like my life was in the 70s and 80s and this now is just like what’s left after the party is over, and the guests leave, and you have to clean up and put away the dishes.” 

I read this as a plaint about passing one’s prime until I did a little arithmetic. Carol turned 30 in 1989 — so it could be argued that what she’s feeling nostalgic for is her pre-prime. For my part, in any event, I’ve never been happier than I am now, living far from the madding crowd with someone I love, and writing every day about stuff that interests me. No, I don’t like getting closer and closer to the day of my demise, but then again that’s a journey we all start on the day we’re born; and after a certain point, to have made it so far begins to feel like a victory. Yes, I do wish I had the body (and the hair) I had in my thirties, but I wouldn’t exchange the life I have now for the life I had then. 

Because the truth is that for many of us, the so-called prime of life is not all fun. It can be — among many other things — a time of confusion about what to do with one’s life, a time of ridiculous professional competition, of calamitous personal choices, of midlife crisis, and of foolish restlessness born of a fear that you might be missing something, somewhere. If you’re lucky, making it to your post-prime brings with it at least a degree of serenity and contentment — plus the rewards of the long perspective, which, in the case of some individuals, anyway, might fairly be described as wisdom.

During most of the history of humanity, age was honored. Ever since the 1950s, however, youth — at least in the West — has been celebrated. Today almost all pop culture is aimed at the young, who are sent the message that youth is an accomplishment — and that it’ll last forever. Many of them seem to believe it. 

Or, at least, want to. Alexander Rybak, the gifted Norwegian singer-songwriter who scored the biggest Eurovision win ever in 2009 with his song “Fairytale,” has a new tune out entitled “Kid.” “I don’t want to grow up,” he sings. “So I’ll stay forever a kid.” He’s 37.

Yes, it’s just a pop song. But it expresses a view of life that’s widespread these days among privileged 20- and 30-somethings. Coddled by suburban parents, babied at high-status colleges, they enter the job world barely understanding what’s expected of them. They’ve never had to follow orders or spend days or weeks at an unpleasant task. And they’re so spoiled that they actually think it’s their right to protest when, say, the book publisher that just hired them two weeks ago signs up an author whose politics they disapprove of. On paper, they’re adults; in reality, no. If 70 is the new 50, maybe 40 is the new 20? (READ MORE: Losing the Youth Vote)

No Help From the Greats

Since I’m writing here about a perennial topic, I figured I’d check in with the great essayists. They weren’t much help. Montaigne (1533-92), who gave the essay its name, wrote the following in “Of Age”: “I believe that our souls are as mature at twenty as they are ever likely to be, and as capable then as ever.” Well, maybe in the 16th century, but not now. 

Then there’s the first English essayist, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who in “Youth and Age” wrote: “Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.” Sorry, but that doesn’t ring true for me either.  

Sitting at my computer pondering this topic, I checked in on one of Megyn Kelly’s recent podcasts. Interviewing Alan Dershowitz, who is very actively involved in challenging the premises of some of the highly irregular anti-Trump lawsuits brought by Democrats around the country, Kelly gushed over his intellectual acuity, telling him that he’s “sharp as a tack.” Of course, that’s not something you say to somebody in his twenties or thirties. Nor do you tell a young person that he’s “spry.” These are compliments reserved for the old. 

Dershowitz is 85. And whether you think he’s in his prime or not, he’s still making a difference. And, unlike our 80-year-old president, making sense. That means something, doesn’t it?